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The next speaker in this session at the 5th Data Donation Symposium at the Weizenbaum-Institut in Berlin is Elisabeth Schmidbauer, whose interest is especially in the role of visual communication in recruiting data donations. This was tested by using eye tracking and a post-exposure walkthrough of the eye-tracking data, in an experimental setting.

Key theoretical backgrounds here include social presence, tested by including a picture of the researcher in recruitment materials; the impact of AI-generated images in the communication of studies, where (poorly designed) AI content might put off potential participants; and the question of how much potential participants engage …

The next session at the 5th Data Donation Symposium at the Weizenbaum-Institut in Berlin starts with Olya Hakobyan, whose focus is on the question of how to scale up data donation studies. The first challenge is how to motivate and recruit participants, which is centrally a question of trust in the researchers; the second is dropouts of participants due to technical difficulties; the next is managing the influx of data donations, especially if studies have been able to recruit a substantial number of participants; and finally studies also need to confront the challenge of varying data quality in donations.

Olya’s …

It’s the first day in October, and I’ve made my way to the 5th Data Donation Symposium at the Weizenbaum-Institut in Berlin, and we start today with a keynote by Jasper Tjaden from the University of Potsdam, whose topic is social media data acquisition through social research bots. This is especially valuable for social media audit studies; it moves beyond the understanding of bots as problematic actors that meddle in information and communication flows, and instead uses bots for good.

Such bots then become a vehicle for data collection, and fight for transparency in data science. One way of doing …

The final speaker in this final paper session at the SEASON 2026 conference in Hamburg is Tereza Schambergerová. Her focus is on the impact of search engine optimisation (SEO) on AI overviews, but she begins by introducing the three key theories of political economy in the attention economy, gatekeeping as it applies to search engines, and the agenda-setting function of search engines like Google.

Her work draws on three datasets, with a focus on the Czech Republic: AI overview monitoring data from DataForSEO; search volume information from Ahrefs; and real click-through rate (CTR) data using the Google Search Console. In …

The next speaker at the SEASON 2026 conference in Hamburg is Hadeer ElMalah, whose focus is on both search engine optimisation (SEO) and generative engine optimisation (GEO). The algorithms that manage SEO on the search engine side have evolved greatly over the years, but are now further disrupted by AI-enhanced search processes. For marketers, the big question is now how to get brands cited in AI responses.

This requires a more advanced understanding of how generative AI engines choose what to cite. Very basically, retrieval-augmented generation relies on indexing documents; retrieving potentially relevant materials in response to a query; and …

We’re already in the final aber session at the SEASON 2026 conference in Hamburg, which starts with Sebastian Schultheiß, whose interest is in the impacts of search engine optimisation. SEO includes all measures a Website can take to improve its ranking in the organic search results provided by a search engine, as opposed to any paid advertising.

SEO’ed content may not actually be of better quality than the content it displaces in search results, of course – but what do we mean by quality here? We might think about intrinsic quality, referring to the inherent attributes of a document and …

The next speaker in this session at the SEASON 2026 conference in Hamburg is Ann-Sofie Klareld, whose interest is in the Swedish initiative to invest in the development of a national archives search engine. Her Arkiv project is interested in technologies for accessing archives, and their intentions. Archives are often seen as lying dormant: they are available, but not necessarily very visible or widely used. Technology is being used to remedy this and make archives more accessible.

Search engines are one such technology: they can make archives considerably more accessible, but archival search also differs from Web search, as the …

The next speaker in this session at the SEASON 2026 conference in Hamburg is my excellent colleague Ashwin Nagappa, who further highlights the challenges of doing research on search engines. Search engine research has long been considered an extension of the information retrieval disciplines, but this has been limiting: various other fields also have a stake in this, and in contrast to the situation, for instance, in social media research the research tools and data access provisions for search engine research are still a great deal more rudimentary.

Our work is in the ARC Centre of Excellence for Automated Decision-Making …

The next session at the SEASON 2026 conference in Hamburg has started with my great colleague Kateryna Kasianenko from the ARC Centre of Excellence for Automated Decision-Making and Society, who is presenting our work on exploring the impact of query variations on the results that search engines return. But how do we study such query variations systematically? How do we even determine what range of queries people might use as they search for a specific topic?

One answer to this wicked problem is via hackathons: but such hackathons tend to involve only interested participants, and people who may be …

The second day at the SEASON 2026 conference in Hamburg starts with a keynote by the fabulous Katrin Weller from GESIS, whose focus is on the European Union’s Digital Services Act and its implications for search studies. Much of this focusses on Article 40, which requires very large online platforms and search engines (VLOPs/VLOSEs) to provide data access to researchers – which is helpful, but not a perfect solution.

Very large here means over 45 million users in the EU (10% of the EU population), and some 25 platforms have been designated under the DSA by now; these include social …